Blog do Curso de Medicina da Universidade Estadual de Maringá para a discussão de temas de Educação Médica, Educação das Profissões da Saúde e áreas correlatas.
Blog of University of Maringá Medical School for the discussion of issues of Medical Education, Health Professions Education and related areas.

domingo, 19 de outubro de 2014

MOOCs

Universities Rethinking Their Use of Massive Online Courses

By REEVE HAMILTON OCT. 17, 2014

Professor Michael Webber and a
design team on Monday discussing the next steps for “Energy 101,” a
massive online course offered by U.T.-Austin.Credit
Charlie Pearce for The Texas Tribune

AUSTIN
— In Texas political circles, massive open online courses — commonly
known as MOOCs — have enjoyed a resurgence. Officials have praised the
typically free college classes, available to anyone with Internet
access, as a crucial component in the future of higher education.

Last
month, Greg Abbott, the Republican candidate for governor, called on
colleges to offer credit for such courses. Later, after a meeting of the
House Higher Education Committee on the topic, State Representative Dan
Branch, a Dallas Republican and the panel’s chairman, said he was “more
convinced that high-quality online content will improve and ultimately
reduce the cost of education.”

In
the state’s academic circles, however, such courses are being
reimagined, and a focus that was so prevalent two years ago is giving
way to other priorities that university leaders believe will be more
effective in meeting their goals.

“I
think MOOCs have been helpful and an important catalyst, but they have
also been a distraction,” said Harrison Keller, the University of Texas
at Austin’s vice provost for higher-education policy and research.

Two
years ago, the University of Texas System was the first of the state’s
public higher-education institutions to jump on the bandwagon. The
system invested $5 million in edX, a nonprofit provider of such courses.

Gene
Powell, then the U.T. System’s chairman of the board, said the decision
would further the system’s efforts to raise graduation rates and reduce
higher-education costs.

The
system invested an additional $1.5 million in the development of
courses for edX at U.T.-Austin, which rolled out its initial offerings
last fall. About $250,000 also went to the University of Texas at
Arlington, which will unveil its first edX course next week. The system
initially signaled that edX courses might be offered for credit, but
that has yet to happen.

Rice University also offers courses through edX, as well as a for-profit called Coursera. The University of Houston
System announced that it would begin offering courses through Coursera
this year. (U.T-Austin, U.T-Arlington, Rice University and the
University of Houston are corporate sponsors of The Texas Tribune.)

Such
online courses have suffered backlash, both in Texas and nationally.
Most individuals signing up for courses do not complete them —
completion rates for U.T.-Austin’s first four massive open online
courses ranged from about 1 percent to 13 percent — and those who
finished tended to be individuals already with high levels of
educational attainment.

James
Hallmark, vice chancellor for the Texas A&M University System,
which has yet to offer such courses, said his system’s caution “looks
like profound wisdom.”

“A
lot of people invested a lot of money only to find out it doesn’t work
that well,” Mr. Hallmark said. (The A&M System is a corporate
sponsor of The Tribune.)

With
about 5,000 students completing the course out of roughly 44,000 who
signed up, the most popular massive online course at U.T.-Austin was
“Energy 101,” which cost more than $400,000 to produce initially.

Calling
the class a success, Prof. Michael Webber is preparing to teach it
again and to create another massive course on thermodynamics.

Less
than a third of students who took his course were from the United
States. At least 60 percent already had earned at least a bachelor’s
degree.

Mr. Webber said the value of such courses had changed.

“I
think the hype was that MOOCs are going to replace colleges, and then
there was that fizzle because they weren’t there yet,” he said. “But
they haven’t gone away, and they aren’t going to go away, because they
do have the potential to replace textbooks.”

All
the videos and multimedia elements from the “Energy 101” course, along
with roughly 350 pages of text, can be downloaded as an interactive
application. Mr. Webber believes that the application will soon have
assessment capabilities that are not available in either textbooks or
the online course.

Unlike
a book, Mr. Webber’s team can update the application anytime. The $50
price tag is also significantly less than a new textbook, and the
proceeds return directly to the institution. “Everyone wins,” he said.

Other
edX courses offered by U.T.-Austin have been released in a more
standard electronic book format. For his thermodynamics course, Mr.
Webber plans to make the application first and then turn that into a
massive online course.

Citing
Mr. Webber as an example, Mr. Keller said faculty should start focusing
on creating digital content that is platform-agnostic and can be
repurposed online and in classrooms.

Mr.
Keller said a colleague referred to his vision of a repository of
digital content, from which faculty could piece courses together, as “a
new academic D.J. culture.”

“I
love the metaphor,” Mr. Keller said. “The issues that come up about
intellectual property, fair use and how you remix things for different
audiences, it actually fits pretty well for the kinds of issues that
come up.”

While
it still encourages campuses to experiment with such courses, and
expects to release additional offerings through edX, the U.T. System is
not providing additional financing for massive online course
development, officials said this week.

Marni
Baker Stein, the chief innovation officer of the system’s Institute for
Transformational Learning, which oversees its MOOC initiatives, said it
determined that getting students to graduate required innovation on a
larger scale.

Next
year, the institute will start a “middle school to medical school”
initiative to redesign curriculums that use technology to better provide
younger students with the necessary skills to ultimately become
physicians. A similar project is planned for engineering education.
Steven Mintz, the executive director, told lawmakers the institute would
invest $10 million into such initiatives in the next fiscal year.

The
approach to massive online courses is changing at edX, as well. Kathy
Pugh, the company’s vice president of education services, said edX is
experimenting with college prep courses for high school students and
continuing education courses for professionals. She said those concerned
about completion rates were “focusing on an old paradigm for a new
audience.”

EdX
is also rethinking the structure of courses. Ms. Pugh noted that both
instructors and students seemed to respond well to courses shorter than a
traditional college semester.

Janet
Walkow, a U.T.-Austin professor who ran an already shorter-than-usual
eight-week online course about drug development, intends to break that
course into two four-week courses. She is also working on turning some
of the content created for the course into an interactive game.

“The
MOOC was a good starting point. It’s a lot of work, and if you don’t
have a strategy, you kind of lose the value,” she said.